This is my personal blog. I was Branch Secretary of Lambeth UNISON from 1992 to 2017 and a member of the National Executive Council (NEC) of UNISON, the public service union (www.unison.org.uk) from 2003 to 2017.
I am Chair of Brighton Pavilion Constituency Labour Party and of the Sussex Labour Representation Committee (LRC).
Neither the Labour Party nor UNISON is responsible for the contents of this personal blog. (Nor is my employer!)

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Wednesday, September 04, 2019

The General Election - and after

As the General
Election looms, our Party needs to be on an election footing and – not before
time (as
I was saying) we are moving to the selection of candidates.

However, some
of the most
insightful comments I have read on the current political crisis direct our
attention elsewhere. Aditya Chakrabortty says that; “our political parties, chiefly Labour, need to show the public what
use they are in the 21st century. That means providing advice to voters, not
just members, on welfare, housing and employers. It means acting to
collectively procure cheap utility deals. It means laying on classes in how
politics and economics work and why they matter. Real democratic renewal will
not come through Westminster manoeuvring, or new pieces of legal text, but
through building serious and sturdy new institutions.”

I think this
challenge should be of interest to all those of us who are more than a little
disappointed at the limited impact on real life of the surge in Labour Party
membership after 2015 – and may be particularly relevant to mass membership
CLPs (Constituency Labour Parties) which aren’t on anyone’s list of marginal
target seats.

Having had
several weeks to lie in bed watching 1970s television (as I slowly regain good
health) and to think about how the world has changed , I am very struck by the
relevance of Chakrabortty’s arguments which I will paraphrase to say that, in
the twenty first century, a civil society which is weaker and less rooted than
it was in my youth currently fails to challenge and sustain democratic
institutions. The weakness of those institutions enables tiny political figures
like Boris Johnson to try to ignore them.

Rebuilding
civil society in general (and the working class movement in particular) is at
least as important as putting a socialist in Downing Street – and the hundreds
of thousands of Labour Party members, many of whom are already active in their
communities, could be the people to take this task on.

In the coming
weeks we must focus on the General Election, but in the coming months and years
we need to think about what we want from our Party in the twenty first century,
and then act upon those thoughts.